After a local disaster, Tayshan Hayden-Smith helps neighborhoods rebuild—with plants
The former pro soccer player has returned home to London with a plan to rejuvenate the city’s neighborhoods—and empower its young people—with urban gardening.
When Tayshan Hayden-Smith was growing up with his three siblings in London public housing, he dreamed of playing for Arsenal, the famous football club, and the family’s small garden became his pitch. He honed his skills dribbling between his mother’s rosebushes and lavender plants, his shots careening off her avocado tree. “It was like the garden versus football,” he recalls. For a time, in the backyard and in his heart, football reigned supreme, and by the time he was 20, he was playing professionally in Austria.
Then, on a June evening in 2017, he got a text from his sister: a picture of Grenfell Tower, the housing project across the street from their home, consumed by flames. Seventy-two people would lose their lives in the tragedy, Britain’s worst residential fire since World War II. “All my friends were in Grenfell Tower and the surrounding area,” he says. “That was the moment I decided that I wasn’t going to extend my contract and I needed to be at home.”
When Hayden-Smith moved back to London, he sought to bring solace to his old neighborhood, North Kensington, and found inspiration in his mother’s garden. An elevated highway known as the Westway runs through the community, and underneath it, in an area where street artists mingled with people seeking shelter, Hayden-Smith found a trash-strewn patch of soil. He and his partner began cleaning and planting it, and others joined in. “It was a ready-to-go kind of garden,” he says. “Just a blank canvas of a space with soil.” Local nurseries contributed plants—loads of geraniums and even a few palm trees. One resident decided to grow yams. For a neighborhood reeling from devastation, the little plot of land beneath the highway became a symbol of regrowth. Hayden-Smith and his friends named it the Grenfell Garden of Peace.
Soon they would transform five other blighted spaces into public gardens, and Hayden-Smith realized he’d grown into an activist. And others were interested in joining the cause. He launched a new nonprofit called Grow to Know in 2020 and at the time brought in others, including Danny Clarke, a British Jamaican horticulturist who hosts the BBC show The Instant Gardener, and Ali Yellop, a London-based agriculturist. The organization remains devoted to making green spaces more accessible to disenfranchised people and educating a diverse, new generation of outdoor activists. “I’ve got two young children,” Hayden-Smith says. “And I was like, what if you don’t have the time to garden? What if you don’t have the resources? You’re cutting out a whole demographic of people who don’t have the access.”
At the same time, his mission has expanded in a holistic way that “seeks joy and justice,” he says. The goals now include empowering grassroots movements that battle inequity while building stronger communities, and advocating for governmental policies to protect those who live there. Some Grow to Know projects focus on racial and environmental history, like the group’s entry in the Royal Horticultural Society’s 2022 Chelsea Flower Show. Its garden installation was inspired by a now closed Caribbean restaurant in North Kensington, the Mangrove, and the nine Black activists who stood trial in 1970 for inciting a riot during their protest against police harassment at the establishment. The project, entitled “Hands Off Mangrove,” also spotlighted the loss of mangrove forests worldwide. Other efforts are more about vibes: Last March, Grow to Know collaborated with Gucci, installing 10,000 ferns and shrubs from a woodland-themed fashion show at the Tate Modern to create a nearby community garden. “We’ve got to tap into these things that young people are already engaged in,” Hayden-Smith says. “If Nike did a campaign and the first hundred people who come to this event get football boots, I’d be the first one there. How do you create that same feeling around nature and flowers and gardening and food security?”
There’s a reason that working with plants is so resonant, Hayden-Smith thinks. “In the garden,” he says, “boundaries and barriers come down.”
